Conventional motion and still electronic imaging systems have been utilized to provide real-time image capture and display. The conventional systems have generally produced standard video resolution analog processed images, for example having 484 lines of image data with each line containing 768 image pixels or less, using image sensors incorporating a single output channel. More recently, higher resolution image sensors have been developed that produce images having over 1000 image lines in which each line contains over 1000 image pixels. The use of the higher resolution image sensors is of particular interest in medical and scientific applications, where it may be desirable to capture still frames for detailed analysis from real-time full motion video. Full motion video, however, generally requires the capture of at least thirty image frames per second. In order to keep the read out rates of high resolution image sensor reasonable (about 20 MHz), it is desirable to utilize image sensors with dual channel outputs. A substantial amount of time, effort and expense could be saved if the digital processing circuits utilized to process the image data from single channel low resolution sensors utilized in conventional systems could be adapted to handle the higher output data rates of the dual channel high resolution image sensors.
Accordingly, it is an object of the invention to provide a system architecture that utilizes digital signal processing circuitry designed to operate with single channel low resolution sensors to process the output data from high resolution dual channel image sensors.